ABSTRACT: Core C: Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. The Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core (Core) provides collaborative statistical and informatics support to SPORE projects, developmental projects, and other cores. The comprehensive nature of the Core, which will have activities at both Iowa and Mayo, assures each SPORE investigator access to expertise that includes development of study designs and analysis plans, state of the art data analysis and interpretation, data management resources, and abstract and manuscript preparation. The Core builds upon the innovative and time-tested procedures and systems developed by the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics at Mayo Clinic, one of the largest analytical groups in the country whose members have collaborated on more than 8,000 clinical and basic science research studies since 1966, as well as the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Biostatistics Department at the University of Iowa. For this funding cycle, we added a senior Bioinformaticist staff as a Core member for the proposed sequencing methods in the projects. The Core members will provide design and analysis support across a range of fields, including epidemiological studies, basic sciences including translational and immunologic correlative studies, gene microarray, gene and mutation discovery, expression analysis and genomics, and computational biology. The Core developed the statistical plans for past studies initiated in the SPORE, and has been actively involved in the preparation of statistical plans for the four projects in this application. Support is also provided for the management and integration of existing and newly collected data through consistent and compatible data handling. Areas of support include database development, data form development and processing, data collection and entry, data archiving, quality control, and management of information relating to gene mutation identification and genotyping data for disease linkage experiments. In the past funding periods, the Core developed and maintained the infrastructure to link lymphoma clinical and research databases between University of Iowa and Mayo Clinic. This system is fully functional and allows web-based clinical registration and data entry from both sites into a common database. Furthermore, the Core has and will continue to provide data management for all studies, to monitor adverse events in conjunction with the Clinical Research Core, and to prepare data summaries for manuscript preparation. In summary, strengths of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core are our collaboration with each of the projects and cores, the ability to utilize the established centralized research database as well as the operational and statistical infrastructure already in place in the SPORE, and the breadth of expertise provided by Biostatistics and Bioinformatics personnel.